Journey is a short film by Action Studios, created as an entry for several film competitions, including Film Riot and My Rode Reel 2020. The mythology of the story has a very science-fiction vibe, and as the visual effects supervisor and lead artist, I helped bring it to life in a number of ways.

One of the longer cuts of the film contains an animated map sequence to help establish the lore of the world. I had our concept artist draw up a top and side view of the multiple “island” worlds, then did my best to use projection mapping to make them look three dimensional. I used Blender 3D for the island animation and renderings and Adobe After Effects for pretty much everything else.

The main visual effects for this film were the large futuristic gates which act as portals and allow the characters to travel between worlds.

In order to bring these to the screen, it was a collaborative effort between myself and Benjamin McCloskey, another artist on the team, who did the modeling, texturing, and rendering for the portals themselves. I believe he used 3DS Max and Redshift for the renderings. I completed the shots by carefully tracking in his work and applying all the necessary compositing elements such as slight color correction, atmosphere, and environmental elements to blend everything together and help sell the massive scale of these gates.

There were several instances of these gates throughout the film. The most important element for blending the gates with the rest of the shot was finding a good balance of atmosphere- the further away, the more atmosphere is used.

One of the coolest gate shots involved our bedraggled protagonist washing up on the shore of a beach. I had to use several different techniques to get a realistic looking reflection of the gate on the surface of the water.

At one point, one of the characters comes face to face with a terrifying cyclops. I modeled the eye socket and eyeball using textures from my own eye, then combined it with an existing rigged 3D model to bring the creature to life.

A character is mortally wounded by one of the monsters during another scene. This one in particular was challenging, because of the amount of fog and dust in the air. Simulating that volumetric feeling of the shadow as the monster passes by was crucial.

This film got pretty close to winning some huge cash prizes. Still makes for a great portfolio piece for all involved.